Robert Russa Moton Museum

Transcription

You're in the Robert Russa Moton Museum. It's inside the former Moton High School and what we wanted to do was to tell the story of the national impact of this building. We broke up the story into five unique segments and used an individual classroom for each. It begins with a student call for better conditions in 1951 led by 16-year-old Barbara Johns, when she says we want "separate but equal" fulfilled. Now this is 1951. This is four years before the Montgomery bus boycott. It's nine years before the Woolworth's lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro. This is the white high school, Farmville High School. Almost 400 students go to that school. This is the Negro high school, the one we're inside, Moton High School. More than 450 students go here. One story building, augmented by tar paper shacks, two-story building, complete campus. What we want the visitor to understand and understand it really through the eyes of the student, understand what it was like to go to school in a tar paper shack. What you'll see when you come in here is still a great pride in the citizen, in the student. There's still a great thirst for education, they're very respectful, they're very knowledgeable, it's just they're dealing with lesser facilities. The students struck on April 23rd. They stayed out for two weeks and four weeks later, May 23rd, 1951, one-third of the student body had signed on to Davis versus Prince Edward, which would be the Prince Edward case in Brown v. Board. We bring the visitor and place them between the two sets of students because we want to ask, can separate be equal, can we do it by showing views of both schools? And can we let the visitor know that who's really answering this question is the Supreme Court of 1954, there with Earl Warren in the center. They're weighing not only Prince Edward County, but also the four other cases in Brown. After Brown, Prince Edward County said we don't hold that you have to have public schools. My father told us, he told us the schools were not going to reopen. He said I promise you in spite of everything that's going on you're going to be educated. It was a traumatic episode in our life because, because education was so important to us and then suddenly we didn't have it. This is the gallery that's really the heart of the museum. This is where we were really able to integrate the story across the community lines. Because the segregationists, by closing all the schools in the county, created the same set of choices to be made for all parents and students in the county. These are the training centers that we went to in Prince Edward. Training center is what they called it, in the basement of a church. And unlike the white children we didn't have buses, so at ten years old I was hiking three miles to school in the morning and three miles home in the evening. But we did it. My mother had received a letter saying that there was a possibility that there would be a private school for white children. And there may be a ten dollar per person bus fee and a $250 per person student fee. And we knew we couldn't afford that. There are the students who stayed in Prince Edward County and their parents accepted the private alternative and they enrolled in Prince Edward Academy. And then there are also a large number of students who simply left the county. Some of his coworkers helped my father find a house to rent in Appomattox County. And my father would drop us off at this house every morning on his way to work and then we would hide out behind the house. When the bus came we would come through the house through the front door and get on the bus. Before we knew it there were like almost 21 children being dropped off at that house pretending that they lived there so they could go to school in Appomattox County. We ended up moving away, moving away from this area. It wasn't half as traumatic for me or my family or white people as it must have been for black people, I know that, I realize that. But it changed whole lives. Their protests carry on not just from Farmville but become part of the March on Washington. And the large banner you see here is one carried by the students who went to hear Martin Luther King speak. But they're also protesting for the reopening of their schools. In the fifth year the local government did allow the federal government to lease the buildings through a foundation and fund them privately. Plans are made to open the schools on Monday, the 16th of September, 1963. Sunday morning September 15th, 1963, the world is shocked by a bomb that's set off in Birmingham, Alabama. What do you do? Do you still go ahead and open? Will parents actually send their children to schools if they're seeing this on the news? But schools did open, the buses ran, the students showed up and the rest as they say is history. The parents that fought so hard for their children to go to school, that's a part of history that makes me very proud. We're still healing, we're still learning, we're still moving beyond all of this. And we will be doing that for some time. What we'd like young people to take away from this exhibit is that change is constantly moving in America and you need to understand the republic you're about to inherit if you want to be an active citizen and cause that change.